The rains that year were good; they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them—or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about a simple thing like the weather needs experience, which Margaret, born and brought up in Johannesburg, had not got. The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. She still did not understand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the government. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers’ language. And she noticed that for all Richard’s and Stephen’s complaints, they did not go bankrupt. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably.
Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet months, steamy with the heat that rose in wet, soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky in the city. So that evening, when Richard said, “The government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up north,” her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Insects, swarms of them—horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the nearest mountaintop. “We haven’t had locusts in seven years,” one said, and the other, “They go in cycles, locusts do.” And then: “There goes our crop for this season!”
But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. “Look, look!” he shouted. “There they are!”
Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kitchen. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. Locusts. There they came.
At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin cans—any old bits of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry.
And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. When the government warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green over the rich dark red, and around each patch now drifted up thick clouds of smoke. The men were throwing wet leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. Margaret was watching the hills. Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. The telephone was ringing—neighbors to say, Quick, quick, here come the locusts! Old Smith had already had his crop eaten to the ground. Quick, get your fires started! For, of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the next, it was only fair to warn the others; one must play fair. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from a myriad of fires. Margaret answered the telephone calls and, between them, stood watching the locusts. The air was darkening—a strange darkness, for the sun was blazing. It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight comes down distorted—a thick, hot orange. It was oppressive, too, with the heaviness of a storm. The locusts were coming fast. Now half the sky was darkened. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reaching almost to the sun itself.
Margaret was wondering what she could do to help. She did not know. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. “We’re finished, Margaret, finished!” he said. “Those beggars can eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour! But it’s only early afternoon. If we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they’ll settle somewhere else, perhaps.” And then: “Get the kettle going. It’s thirsty work, this.”
So Margaret went to the kitchen and stoked up the fire and boiled the water. Now on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down the tin slope. Here were the first of them. From down on the lands came the beating and banging and clanging of a hundred petrol tins and bits of metal. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled one petrol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and orange-colored—and another with water. In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had been eaten out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. And then, still talking, he lifted the heavy petrol cans, one in each hand, holding them by the wooden pieces set cornerwise across the tops, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty laborers.
By now, the locusts were falling like hail on the roof of the kitchen. It sounded like a heavy storm. Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a crisscross of the insects, and she set her teeth and ran out into it; what the men could do, she could. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady, old men’s eyes while they clung to her with their hard, serrated legs. She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the insects. It was a half night, a perverted blackness. Then came a sharp crack from the bush—a branch had snapped off. Then another. A tree down the slope leaned over slowly and settled heavily to the ground. Through the hail of insects, a man came running. More tea, more water were needed. Margaret supplied them. She kept the fires stoked and filled tins with liquid, and then it was four in the afternoon and the locusts had been pouring across overhead for a couple of hours.
Up came old Stephen again—crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room.
“All the crops finished. Nothing left,” he said.
But the gongs were still beating, the men still shouting, and Margaret asked, “Why do you go on with it, then?”
“The main swarm isn’t settling. They are heavy with eggs. They are looking for a place to settle and lay. If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that’s everything. If they get a chance to lay their eggs, we are going to have everything eaten flat with hoppers later on.” He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs. “Imagine that multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march? No? Well, you’re lucky.”
Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside, the light on the earth was now a pale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving insects alternately thickened and lightened, like driving rain. Old Stephen said, “They’ve got the wind behind them. That’s something.”
“Is it very bad?” asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, “We’re finished. This swarm may pass over, but once they’ve started, they’ll be coming down from the north one after another. And then there are the hoppers. It might go on for three or four years.”
Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it’s the end, it’s the end. What now? We’ll all three have to go back to town. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. Poor old man. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, and held it in the air by one leg. “You’ve got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours,” he told the locust good-humoredly. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn, he nevertheless took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had announced their final and irremediable ruin.
“Get me a drink, lass,” Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him.
In the meantime, thought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of insects, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the insects clung all over him. She shuddered. “How can you bear to let them touch you?” she asked Stephen. He looked at her disapprovingly. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she was a proper farmer’s wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her, in time.
Having tossed down a couple of whiskeys, old Stephen went back into the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts.
Five o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick as ever overhead. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.
Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless. If it wasn’t a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn’t locusts, it was army worms or veldt fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in a storm. The ground was invisible in a sleek brown surging tide; it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in under the weight of them, as if the door might give in under their pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark. Through the window, she looked up at the sky. The air was thinner; gaps of blue showed in the dark moving clouds. The blue spaces were cold and thin; the sun must be setting. Through the fog of insects, she saw figures approaching. First old Stephen, marching bravely along, then her husband, drawn and haggard with weariness, and behind them the servants. All of them were crawling with insects. The sound of the gongs had stopped. Margaret could hear nothing but the ceaseless rustle of myriads of wings.
The two men slapped off the insects and came in.
“Well,” said Richard, kissing her on the cheek, “the main swarm has gone over.”
“For the Lord’s sake!” said Margaret angrily, still half crying. “What’s here is bad enough, isn’t it?” For although the evening air was no longer black and thick but a clear blue, with a pattern of insects whizzing this way and that across it, everything else—trees, buildings, bushes, earth—was gone under the moving brown masses.
“If it doesn’t rain in the night and keep them here,” Stephen said, “if it doesn’t rain and weight them down with water, they’ll be off in the morning at sunrise.”
“We’re bound to have some hoppers,” said Richard. “But not the main swarm. That’s something.”
Margaret roused herself, wiped her eyes, pretended she had not been crying, and fetched them some supper, for the servants were too exhausted to move. She sent them off to the compound to rest.
She served the supper and sat listening. There was not one maize plant left, she heard. Not one. They would get the planting machines out the moment the locusts had gone. They must start all over again.
What was the use of that, Margaret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers? But she listened while they discussed the new government pamphlet that told how to defeat the hoppers. You must have men out all the time, patrolling the farm, to watch for movement in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers—small, lively black things, like crickets—then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the government. The government wanted every farmer to cooperate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You must attack locusts at the source—hoppers, in short. The men were talking as if they were planning a war, and Margaret listened, amazed.
In the night, it was quiet, with no sign of the armies that had settled outside, except that sometimes a branch snapped or a tree could be heard crashing down.
Margaret slept badly, in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like the dead. In the morning, she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed—clear sunshine, with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. Old Stephen was ahead of her. There he stood, outside, gazing down over the bush. And she gazed, astounded—and entranced, much against her will. For it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth, were lit with pale flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dews. There was a shimmer of red-tinged gold light everywhere.
She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the insects. The two stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue—blue and clear.
“Pretty,” said old Stephen with satisfaction.
Well, thought Margaret, we may be ruined, we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen a locust army fanning their wings at dawn.
Over the slopes in the distance, a faint red smear showed in the sky. It thickened and spread. “There they go,” said old Stephen. “There goes the main army, off south.”
And now, from the trees, from the earth all around them, the locusts were taking wing. They were like small aircraft maneuvering for the takeoff as they tried their wings to see if they were dry enough. Off they went. A reddish-brown steam was rising off the miles of bush, off the farmlands—the earth. Again the sunlight darkened.
And as the clotted branches lifted, the weight on them lightening, there was nothing left but the black spines of branches and tree trunks. No green—nothing. All morning they watched, the three of them—Richard having finally got up—as the brown crust thinned and broke and dissolved, flying up to mass with the main army, now a brownish-red smear in the southern sky. The lands, which had been filmed with the green of the new, tender mealie plants, were stark and bare. A devastated landscape—no green, no green anywhere.
By midday, the reddish cloud had gone. Only an occasional locust flopped down. On the ground lay the corpses and the wounded. The African laborers were sweeping them up with branches and collecting them in tins.
“Ever eaten sun-dried locust, Margaret?” asked old Stephen. “That time twenty years ago when I went broke, I lived on mealie meal and dried locusts for three months. They aren't bad at all—rather like smoked fish, if you come to think of it.”
But Margaret preferred not even to think of it.
After the midday meal, the men went off to the lands. Everything was to be replanted. With a bit of luck, another swarm would not come travelling down just this way. But they hoped it would rain very soon, to spring some new grass, because the cattle would die otherwise; there was not a blade of grass left on the farm. As for Margaret, she was trying to get used to the idea of three or four years of locusts. Locusts were going to be like the weather from now on—always imminent. She felt like a survivor after a war; if this devastated and mangled countryside was not ruin—well, what then was ruin?
But the men ate their supper with good appetites.
“It could have been worse” was what they said. “It could be much worse.”
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